Customer service often requires quick, consistent responses to customer inquiries. In the not so distant past, live service agents responded to most customer inquires by phone. Phone responses are extremely expensive, and with the spread of the internet, live agents began to respond to customer inquiries by cheaper methods such as email and chat programs.
Live agents, whether responding by phone, email or chat program, remain important for many businesses. Companies seeking to further reduce their costs, however, replaced or supplemented live agents with automated systems such as virtual agents and interactive voice response (IVR) systems. Automated systems respond to routine customer inquiries based on a decision tree and/or active logic. These systems are often referred to as “response systems.”
All of these different response systems generally generate some performance metrics by which they can be evaluated. For example, a phone response system can report the number of calls received, average number of minutes required to respond to each call, number of calls abandoned before being reached, etc. Other response systems generally report similar metrics.
Different response systems are generally not integrated, and the different reporting metrics are integrated poorly, if at all. A customer with an email response system, a voice response system, and an automated agent could receive three different sets of metrics and may have no way to evaluate the combined performance of all three systems. Further, these disparate response systems do not enable a consistent response strategy for addressing user inquiries. A phone operator, for example, could generate a different response to a particular inquiry than would an automated system. Such response inconsistencies make integrating metrics from different response systems difficult.
Although present response systems are functional, they are not satisfactory. A system and method are needed to address the shortfalls of present technology and to provide other new and innovative features. For example, systems and methods are needed to better provide an overall, or holistic view, of a company's interaction with its customers. Similarly, a system and method are needed to provide a consistent response strategy across all types of response systems.